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“Virtue” can seem old-fashioned. In fact, virtue—arete—translates to something very simple and very timeless: Excellence. Moral. Physical. Mental.
What was the only example of Jesus losing his temper? It was over the money changers—the den of thieves—who had taken over the temple. They were price gouging. They were harming society.
Of course, it would be wonderful if the world was naturally just, if people were automatically good, always doing the right thing. Sadly, they aren’t and they don’t. It’s one of the most heartbreaking and frustrating things about life.
Even after he was shot in the head, James Meredith kept at it. Doar didn’t quit either. Just like Lemkin and Proxmire. Speech after speech. Motion after motion. Day after day. They stayed with it. They just kept going back, until finally, eventually, they made the tiniest bits of progress. They did their job.
we have the power to enrich ourselves and the world by actively investing this forgiveness wherever possible, whenever we have the opportunity to provide grace to someone who has trespassed against us. This is tough. It may well be the toughest thing there is.
Forgiveness is not martyrdom—it is a kind of conquering, transcending the opponent, the situation, and yourself. Nothing frustrates evil quite like forgiveness. Nothing befuddles hatred quite like not getting hatred in return. So we’ll wield this grace as a weapon, for ourselves and the world.
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin wrote, “and then you read.” It was books, history, philosophy, Baldwin said, that taught him that “the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”
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What they experienced looking at the “Blue Marble” that is our planet was the exact thing that Hierocles was trying to teach people about two thousand years ago. Yes, we naturally think of ourselves and the people we love first, but with work, we can expand that circle of concern larger and larger until we see everything that is alive as one enormous organism. Astronauts experience the exact same thing that Gandhi, who never even flew in a plane, never saw humanity from a vantage point higher than a small-story building, called the great oneness. Realizing this, letting it wash over us,
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People are worse than we’d like. They are also better than we can possibly comprehend. That’s the power of grace.
“Hatred, which could destroy so much,” James Baldwin would write, “has never failed to destroy the men who hated, and this [is] an immutable law.” Love on the other hand, love protects. It trusts. It hopes. It perseveres. It does not fail. Love always wins.
It’s not virtue signaling to push back against cruelty and indifference. It doesn’t make you a “social justice warrior” to speak out for kindness and fairness and inalienable rights.
is anything better to be a warrior for than justice and or anything better to signal than virtue? What has to happen to your brain to be opposed to those things?
